Full Comment - Ben Shapiro on why every Jew he knows is getting a gun

00:00:00.000 Since the terror attacks launched by Hamas against Israel happened on October 7th, there

00:00:19.220 have been rallies and marches around the world. That's not overly surprising. Wars have long

00:00:24.660 brought out protests or marches both for and against the various factions. Usually though,

00:00:29.820 the marches are calling for peace. What's been surprising over the past few weeks is how many

00:00:34.760 people in the Western world are now openly saying that they're on the side of Hamas,

00:00:39.940 a terrorist organization which brutally raped, tortured, murdered, and kidnapped unarmed

00:00:44.300 civilians. Disturbably, a lot of these are professors, students, union organizers, self-proclaimed

00:00:50.100 rights activists who would describe themselves as progressive. Hello and welcome to the Full

00:00:55.880 Comment Podcast. I'm Brian Lilly, your host. And to talk about how we got to this ghastly

00:01:00.480 moment with people in Western countries openly cheering the worst slaughter of Jews from the

00:01:04.760 Holocaust, I'm joined by someone you may know, certainly millions do. Ben Shapiro is an author,

00:01:10.400 journalist, one of the biggest American conservative podcasters. He's one of the founders of the Daily

00:01:15.880 Wire where he hosts the Ben Shapiro show and he spent his career documenting the growing extremism

00:01:20.700 of left-wing activism. If you're in the Calgary area, he'll be there November 16th. I'll give out

00:01:25.740 details on that in a little bit. But on this podcast episode, we're going to discuss how over

00:01:30.760 the past few weeks, we've seen more and more people proclaiming support for the actions of Hamas,

00:01:36.000 an openly genocidal terrorist group fighting against a fellow liberal democracy, and how it's become

00:01:41.940 clear those so-called progressives who rushed out early to celebrate the savage attack on Israel,

00:01:47.260 no, well, they weren't making a mistake. They didn't jump the gun. Backing Hamas is part of

00:01:52.740 their plan. And I'm purposely saying Hamas rather than the Palestinian people or the people of Gaza.

00:01:58.760 Because if you endorse the violence that we've seen, then you are endorsing Hamas. As we've all

00:02:04.820 seen by now, some Hamas fighters documented their evil exploits. They were using GoPro cameras.

00:02:09.460 They used their mobile phones or even the phones of their victims so that they could proudly show the

00:02:14.540 world their hatred and brutality. How intense is the spirit to get free? How deep is the spirit to

00:02:22.740 get free? How beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned how to fly

00:02:30.020 on hand gliders? That was the voice of Harsha Walia, the former head of the British Columbia

00:02:36.420 Civil Liberties Association, celebrating Hamas terrorists learning to fly hand gliders so they

00:02:42.740 could drop into an Israeli music concert where they raped and murdered hundreds of kids. Those

00:02:49.280 comments were made two weeks after the attack that killed more than 1400 people in the Jewish state.

00:02:54.380 Walia's remarks, like so many professors and other left-wingers, were planned and deliberate because

00:02:58.920 the Palestinian people, in their view, are a people who are oppressed by a colonial settler society.

00:03:05.460 These are the words, the same words we hear used by the diversity, equity, and inclusion set who

00:03:10.080 want to use issues of race to determine who is oppressed, who is an oppressor, and then assign

00:03:15.960 them a ranking. How did we get to this point? How did the rot get so deep and is there a way back?

00:03:21.280 I think Ben Shapiro will have some insight about all of this and more and he joins us today from

00:03:26.180 South Florida. Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to see you.

00:03:29.560 I wish it was under better circumstances, but this is an issue that you and I have talked about in the

00:03:35.180 past. But the quickness and the rise of the anti-Semitism that we've seen over the past few

00:03:41.440 weeks since the Hamas terror attacks on Israel is remarkable. But it also tells me that there's

00:03:48.480 something backing it up. There's been stuff happening in the background that allowed us to

00:03:53.840 get to this point. So let me ask you the question I mentioned in the introduction. How did we get to the

00:03:59.120 point where Hamas is openly celebrated in our streets, in our colleges and universities, in our

00:04:05.520 school system, by union leaders? How did we get here? So I think you have to break that down into a

00:04:11.720 few different categories of people who are celebrating Hamas. So you have the radical Islamists who are

00:04:16.240 celebrating Hamas both domestically and abroad. You're seeing hundreds of thousands of people

00:04:19.940 marching the streets in solidarity with a terrorist group calling for the quote-unquote freeing of

00:04:24.780 Palestine from the river to the sea, which of course would mean the obliteration not just of

00:04:27.740 1500 innocent Jewish civilians, but the obliteration of 7 million Jews in the region. And that's not a

00:04:33.600 shock. I mean, this has been true for literally decades. This has been true since the inception

00:04:37.320 of the state of Israel. The only difference that the West decided in our own moral idiocy to import

00:04:42.580 hundreds of thousands of people who think like this in the misgotten belief, in this misbegotten

00:04:46.940 belief that we could somehow not even bother to try and assimilate folks to our ways of thinking

00:04:51.980 about religion and politics, that people would just come to the West and immediately act as good

00:04:57.120 Western citizens and abandon all those old Jew-hating beliefs. And that obviously was not

00:05:00.900 true. And you've seen the impact of that across Europe and Canada, in the United States. And that's

00:05:05.080 kind of part one. Part two is the fellow travelers, the people who are joining in the coalition. And

00:05:10.040 that, I think, to a lot of people is the most shocking part, is seeing people who they thought

00:05:13.720 were mainstream liberals or winking and nodding, in some cases openly promoting Hamas or making excuses

00:05:19.940 for Hamas or attempting to both sides this thing. And that comes from a coalitional approach

00:05:25.800 to wrecking Western institutions. That has less to do with Israel than it has to do with Israel

00:05:30.220 as a stand-in for Western values and Western institutions. And this is how you end up with

00:05:34.900 the idiocy of, for example, queers for Palestine. A lot of people look at this sort of stuff,

00:05:38.960 where you see protests, where somebody's flying a trans flag next to somebody who's flying a Hamas

00:05:43.720 flag. Well, that doesn't make any sense. The Hamas guy will kill the trans guy in like one second.

00:05:48.040 And that's, of course, true. But that's not the point. The reason that the person with the

00:05:50.980 trans flag is marching next to the person with the Hamas flag is this is a coalitional effort

00:05:54.980 to destroy Western values and destroy Western institutions. And that has very deep philosophical

00:06:00.420 roots going back to Lenin. It has philosophical roots going back most plausibly to Frantz Fanon,

00:06:07.400 who is the founder of the sort of anti-colonialist belief system whereby violence was inherently called

00:06:14.520 for justifiable and good if it was directed against the colonial powers. And the left in

00:06:21.480 the United States and abroad has translated colonial power to just mean powerful. So any

00:06:25.560 institution that is powerful is a colonizing power. This is why you hear the language of

00:06:29.160 decolonization applied by Black Lives Matter. It makes no sense in that context. What exactly

00:06:33.460 does colonization have to do with the civil rights of black people in the United States? Black people

00:06:38.400 are not native to the United States. We're not talking about indigenous people. It doesn't have

00:06:41.140 anything to do. But the idea is that if you can translate over the idea that Western culture is

00:06:45.380 inherently evil and flawed, which resulted in colonialism, and that anybody who has been

00:06:50.360 affected by Western culture is therefore part of a powerless, wretched of the earth, that's

00:06:53.840 that's Frantz Fanon's phrase, then that coalition can come together around the common cause of destroying

00:06:58.340 all these institutions. And Israel is just the most obvious thing. You defend other members of the

00:07:01.840 coalition. It doesn't matter if in the end, those other members of the coalition would kill you.

00:07:05.620 For the moment, you guys are allies, and that alliance is what matters.

00:07:08.140 You know, as I've looked at the letters from various student unions, and look, I know they've

00:07:13.860 been happening all over, but I'm in Toronto, and I'm looking at the ones happening here, and

00:07:17.660 you're familiar with this city and the schools, where they put out these letters in support of

00:07:24.220 Palestinian resistance in any form necessary, and then they cloak it in this decolonization,

00:07:31.800 settler colonialism, that that justifies anything. And you read the letter, and you say, well,

00:07:36.700 I'm reading this, and to me, this says that if an indigenous Canadian group decided to, or American

00:07:45.060 decided to say, you know what, I'm going to go into the city, and I'm going to just start killing

00:07:49.620 people and taking their houses. Now, I don't think they will. That's not where the population is.

00:07:54.340 But these people would defend that, because they say they are so against this power structure

00:08:01.660 that they would defend any violence.

00:08:04.900 That's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. This is the stupidity of what, and moral evil,

00:08:09.740 if not had to say, which is, again, this idea that colonialism is sort of unique to the West,

00:08:14.600 which, of course, is a lie. Every culture in human history has engaged in some form of imperialism

00:08:19.400 or colonialism. That's literally the story of human migration across time. And unless you are willing

00:08:24.520 to go back to the year 15,000 BC and try and figure out exactly who was where when, and then

00:08:30.540 their descendants get those places, then what exactly are you talking about? It is a stand-in

00:08:35.720 for the West is evil and must be uniquely punished for its unique evil. What's most amazing in the

00:08:40.640 case of Israel, of course, is that that requires a further flip, which is the idea that the Jews are

00:08:45.160 the colonizing people in Israel when the Jews are actually the indigenous people in Israel. That's the

00:08:50.280 part that really is astonishing. They go even one step beyond that, and that gives away the real game.

00:08:54.520 Because it isn't about colonized versus colonizer. What it really is about is,

00:08:58.700 quote-unquote, powerful versus powerless. It's about using the structure that Fanon created for

00:09:04.060 colonized people against the colonizers and trying to apply that to anyone who is powerful in any

00:09:10.020 circumstance, whether or not they're powerful for a good reason or a bad reason. Anybody who is

00:09:13.840 powerful, those who rise up against that power structure and attempt to destroy it are justified

00:09:19.020 in doing so in the most violent of fashions. Now, you're taking an example where Fanon and company

00:09:23.240 would 100% agree with what you just said, which is the idea that if indigenous members of a community

00:09:28.760 decided to simply go on a murder spree and kill people and do what Hamas just did, that a lot

00:09:32.780 of members of the left would back it. That is certainly true, but it's gone even further than

00:09:36.220 that, which is you don't even have to be a colonized people in its technical sense of the

00:09:39.880 term or a colonizer in the technical sense of the term. You just have to be part of the

00:09:43.200 quote-unquote power structure. If you're part of the power structure, then whatever is done to you

00:09:46.800 is thereby justifiable and justified. Okay, back up. You keep mentioning this man who

00:09:51.360 was part of this. Tell us a little bit about him. Sure. So Frantz Fanon was a francophone from

00:09:57.220 Martinique. He grew up in the 1930s and he went to France. He spent time in Algeria and while he was

00:10:04.520 in Algeria, he began to have a lot of questions about France. He's a Marxist by nature and he started

00:10:10.580 to have questions about the French occupation of Algeria. And so he became a member of the terror

00:10:16.640 group that would later go on to govern Algeria in the aftermath of the Algerian war to separate

00:10:23.140 from the French government. And in the middle of that, he wrote a bunch of books. His most famous

00:10:26.740 book from 1961 is a book called The Wretched of the Earth. This book, The Wretched of the Earth,

00:10:30.680 is what we're saying right now. He literally says violence is justified. Not only is violence

00:10:34.460 justified, violence is necessary. This is how the colonized man cleanses his soul of having been

00:10:40.040 colonized. It's how he becomes the new man. This was taken up by big intellectual things like

00:10:45.860 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the introduction to Fanon's book. And in that introduction, he literally says

00:10:51.280 killing a European is killing two birds with one stone because it's freeing the colonized and it's

00:10:55.380 killing the colonizer. So that's an inherent good. He makes the case that you soft-hearted liberals who

00:11:00.780 think that you're against colonization, you've benefited from colonization. That means you're part of

00:11:04.780 this evil culture and therefore the only way to expiate your sins is to join in the revolution

00:11:09.860 against your own culture. So this book, which was really about the Algerian war, but then was

00:11:15.100 extended beyond its boundaries, was then extended even further into the realm of domestic politics.

00:11:19.240 The idea being that Western culture is inherently flawed and evil. And so if you oppose that, then

00:11:23.180 you are now on the side of the colonized. You, even if you grew up in a place like Canada or the

00:11:27.680 United States, your soul has been colonized by this evil power structure. And the only way to break free

00:11:32.980 of that colonization is to rise up against the power structure.

00:11:35.220 And, you know, if people think we're focusing too much on this theory, this theory now, it permeates

00:11:42.880 our society. It goes down to elementary schools. I'm sure you've seen it in the public schools around

00:11:49.980 where you are. I've seen, you know, people have sent me photos of classroom walls with decolonization up

00:11:56.920 and it's grade three.

00:11:58.860 Yeah, no, that's, no, that's right. I mean, in order to understand the language that these folks

00:12:03.380 are using, you actually have to look at the language they're using when they say the language

00:12:05.920 of settler colonialism, or when they're saying decolonization is what we're about, or even in

00:12:11.420 its supposedly more innocent version, when you have land acknowledgments at events where they'll say,

00:12:16.580 oh, we just acknowledge that we're sitting on indigenous land. What that really is, is an attempt

00:12:20.620 to suggest that the culture that you are a part of is uniquely evil because it engaged in

00:12:25.560 colonialism or imperialism. Well, again, every single culture that we know about on planet Earth

00:12:29.340 has engaged in battles over land, in battles for control of areas. Population migration is a human

00:12:35.460 universal. The difference is that the West happened to be really, really successful at it. And so

00:12:39.800 because of that, the West is supposedly uniquely horrifying and terrible in every possible way. Now,

00:12:45.600 of course, that logic is never applied today, depending on the regime. So if you're talking about

00:12:50.200 the Russians attempting to take over Ukraine, then many of the same people who are standing for

00:12:54.660 Hamas are in favor of Russia taking over Ukraine, for example. So the decolonization effort doesn't

00:12:59.280 apparently apply over there. It doesn't apply to what China has been doing to Tibet. Like there

00:13:03.860 are a bunch of different areas where it's pretty obvious what the game is, and the game is alliance

00:13:08.000 against Western values. But yes, I mean, in order to understand the language, this is everything that

00:13:13.180 ends up in a third grade classroom originally started in a pointy headed professor's head and then was

00:13:17.700 boiled down and boiled down and boiled down further and evaporated down to sort of the core essence

00:13:22.760 slogans that you will see taught at street level or the sort of language that we all just we don't

00:13:28.920 even know what it means. And so we assume we know what it means. But you have to look back at the roots

00:13:33.020 of it to really understand what you're talking about.

00:13:35.420 And you have to go to training seminars in corporate culture to learn about diversity, equity and

00:13:40.740 inclusion where you're taught about settler colonialism.

00:13:43.820 Yes. I mean, again, all of this is an attempt by soft-hearted liberals to expiate their own guilt

00:13:48.380 for their own civilization by supposedly teaching the evils of that civilization.

00:13:53.700 Now, what's ironic about that is a lot of them are doing that in order to enrich themselves still

00:13:56.900 on the basis of the civilization. So they want to they want to be Sartre revolutionaries,

00:14:01.160 but without actually giving up the pay, which is which is what you see in a lot of corporations,

00:14:04.780 right? The corporations like, yeah, we'll continue to benefit from capitalism and make our money.

00:14:07.960 But we'll, you know, throw them a bone in the DEI category by talking about settler colonialism.

00:14:12.320 And then maybe they'll leave us alone. Well, the thing is, they're not going to leave you alone.

00:14:14.880 I mean, the reality is that you are feeding the alligator that's going to destroy you.

00:14:18.420 We need to take a quick break right here, but more with Ben Shapiro when we come back.

00:14:23.260 How have you been feeling the past few weeks? You know, you and your family are now in Florida.

00:14:31.420 Toronto, I used to think was a very safe place for for Jews. I wrote a column this week saying,

00:14:37.340 I'm not sure now I'm not Jewish, but I've got a lot of Jewish friends, Jewish co-workers,

00:14:43.240 all of them are telling me the same thing. There is an unease

00:14:46.580 that they wouldn't expect in this city. And, you know, if you were in Dearborn, I'm sure that you

00:14:53.960 would be very concerned for your family. But how are you feeling where you are after watching

00:14:59.060 the manifestations of this theory turn into outright Jew hatred out in the open?

00:15:05.060 I mean, we're concerned just as members of the Jewish community. Obviously, we're very concerned.

00:15:08.800 We're very active in our community. Every Jew that I know, literally every one of them

00:15:12.540 is in the process of buying a gun and getting training with that gun. That's the beauty of

00:15:16.740 living in Florida is that everybody has a gun anyway. So most of us had guns originally,

00:15:21.180 but but now we're buying more guns. And like today, I'm going for more gun training. So I know better

00:15:26.900 how to how to use that gun if God forbid I have to. I mean, the reality is for me, because I'm very

00:15:30.520 prominent in, you know, in public life and particularly on this issue. And one of the most prominent

00:15:35.220 people, probably the most prominent Orthodox Jew on the planet, right? And just in terms of pure

00:15:40.660 number of social media followers. I mean, I have 24 seven security on me and my family and probably

00:15:44.960 will for the rest of my life. I mean, that's that that's just the reality of the situation that I

00:15:49.480 live with. The stuff that's been super disturbing, it's disturbing on several separate levels. I mean,

00:15:54.820 it's the it's the most emotionally affected. I've been the last three weeks in my entire life,

00:16:02.640 and it's not particularly close. I think I was a little bit too young to really understand the

00:16:06.660 full impact of 9-11 of 17 when 9-11 happened. And so you don't when you're a teenager, you don't

00:16:11.400 experience that in quite the same way. Because when you're 17, you think you're invulnerable.

00:16:15.460 And then when you're almost 40, and you have four kids, and then you look at the pictures of

00:16:19.420 butchered babies, and you're holding a five month old baby, which which we have at home. And you see

00:16:24.760 that, you know, the pictures flash through your brain. It's incredibly disturbing. So there are a bunch of

00:16:29.020 levels on which it's unbelievably disturbing on sort of the personal level, it's really disturbing,

00:16:32.080 because, again, we have incredibly close ties in Israel. I know hundreds of people who have been

00:16:37.540 called up. I know all the government leaders, I know, you know, everybody's one degree removed.

00:16:42.600 Everyone I know has visited a funeral in the last couple of weeks in the state of Israel,

00:16:47.180 literally everyone, most of the multiple funerals. Again, there will be more funerals in the state

00:16:51.820 of Israel, as Israel has to now deploy 18, 19 year old, 20 year old, you know, young people to go and

00:16:56.260 defend their nation. So that that's one level of disturbance is just the pure human horror of it.

00:17:00.560 Uh, the second level of disturbance is the fact that if you are Jewish, one of the great guarantors

00:17:05.740 of Jewish security since 1948 has been the presence of Israel in the Middle East, and the and the power

00:17:10.760 and strength of Israel and its ability to defend itself. And as someone who spends a fair bit of

00:17:14.680 time over in Israel, um, you know, the the vulnerability that was suddenly exposed is incredibly

00:17:19.940 disturbing. And it's incredibly disturbing to everybody who's in Israel, which is why there's

00:17:22.980 going to be a massive ground shift in how people think about politics in Israel. There's been all of

00:17:27.180 this gaseous talk about judicial reform, not judicial reform, divisions between religious

00:17:32.200 and secular in Israel. All of that's about to go by the wayside in a dramatic way. And the only thing

00:17:36.020 that's going to matter for the next 20 to 40 years in Israel is going to be security first. That's all

00:17:39.860 that's going to matter in the state of Israel. And it's going to be long lasting in a way that it

00:17:42.940 wasn't in the United States, because the truth is that what happened on 9-11 in the United States

00:17:46.700 was not an existential danger to the United States. What happened in Israel from Hamas is an

00:17:52.000 it's indicative of a multi-front existential danger, not just from the Gaza Strip, but also

00:17:57.160 from Hezbollah, which is a genocidal terror group located in Israel's north of 150,000 rockets pointed

00:18:01.940 directly into Israeli civilian centers. The genocidal terror groups that exist in the West Bank,

00:18:07.220 Judea and Samaria, who say the exact same things as Hamas and who are allied with Hamas. And there's

00:18:12.660 3 million Palestinians living in those areas, a large number of whom are either associated with terror

00:18:18.480 groups or who support terror groups. The presence of Iran. So suddenly Israel is awake to the fact

00:18:24.500 that their their strength does not guarantee their future security. So things are going to change over

00:18:29.200 there in a dramatic way. And then finally, the response of the world has been so unbelievably

00:18:35.220 disheartening. Obviously, you've seen support from certain political actors in the aftermath of

00:18:41.060 an atrocity, because that's what they have to do. They have to say, oh, but then the quick swift

00:18:46.380 swivel into two state solution is the only thing that has to happen here. What this really is about

00:18:52.180 is people building bathrooms and a fraud. If it just weren't and we have to warn the Israelis,

00:18:56.560 they have to be very careful about civilian casualties, really, really careful as though

00:18:59.440 the Israelis are not literally risking the life and limb of their own citizens in order to stop

00:19:02.940 the death of civilians in Gaza, who Hamas is hiding in front of its rockets. The shift that took place

00:19:08.820 in about two point five seconds from this is the worst atrocity that we've seen on tape in since

00:19:14.960 the Holocaust or at least since nine eleven. What the shift from that to we have to put dampers on

00:19:24.040 Israel to stop Israel. Israel is the real human rights violator. Huge protests in the streets in

00:19:28.060 support of open terrorist groups like that's been unbelievably disheartening, obviously, and very

00:19:32.800 difficult to contend with on an emotional level. I can only imagine. I mean, you know my long-standing

00:19:39.140 support for Israel, and I didn't do that 2.5-second pivot, but I've watched a lot of it.

00:19:48.020 I know you follow Canadian politics. You like poking Justin Trudeau over silly things. This is a very

00:19:54.840 serious issue, and his initial statements were very good. I'm not going to nitpick our

00:20:02.600 government too much because we don't have a lot to offer, and that's a problem. We should have more

00:20:07.480 to offer, but his initial statements were good, and then that hospital incident. He couldn't say

00:20:14.580 that Israel didn't do it, and it's because of divisions in his own liberal party caucus, and

00:20:21.880 I would have to say, you know, you and I are not fans of Joe Biden, but Biden has actually been

00:20:27.740 pretty good. He's been pretty good on this. He's been much better on this, for sure.

00:20:31.860 Trudeau's been one of those guys that's wavering because he's licking his finger and putting it up

00:20:37.280 in the air to see which way the wind's blowing. Not a major shock. I mean, I think that, first of

00:20:41.140 all, he's deeply concerned about his own domestic political prospects, given the fact that the

00:20:45.000 conservatives finally have a pretty excellent candidate in Pierre Polivier. I'm sure I'm

00:20:50.720 screwing up his name in some way, but he's terrific. But Trudeau, like a lot of Democratic leaders in

00:20:56.200 it in the House of Congress, you know, he's going to provide some sort of, you know, generalized

00:20:59.960 support, but he's so afraid of his own base that he's afraid that they're going to come after him

00:21:03.780 and he's going to lose support if he actually says the right thing. There are some members of

00:21:07.560 Congress who are doing the same thing in the United States. You mentioned Biden. Biden overall has been

00:21:13.620 a lot stronger than I thought he would be, given his history with kind of kowtowing to Iran

00:21:19.920 and making nice with, yes, terrorist groups. I mean, he sent hundreds of millions of dollars to

00:21:25.000 the UNRWA, which then got funneled directly to Hamas in many cases. The restoration of-

00:21:30.080 Stephen Harper, you know, you came up and met Stephen Harper when he was prime minister in Canada.

00:21:34.400 He blocked funding for UNRWA. One of Justin Trudeau's first acts was to bring it back and-

00:21:39.380 Yeah, exactly.

00:21:39.760 And they said, well, no, we've got assurances that they won't be teaching people to hate you.

00:21:44.000 All we have to do is keep looking at the textbooks. And, you know, I think our school systems

00:21:49.160 in our countries are bad. The UNRWA ones literally teach young Palestinian children

00:21:54.700 to hate Jews from the time they can read.

00:21:58.220 100%. I mean, I did a whole podcast yesterday about UNRWA and their evils. I mean, the fact

00:22:02.820 is that UNRWA is, I mean, they are working hand-in-glove with Hamas. Hamas hides terror

00:22:07.340 tunnels directly beneath UNRWA schools, knowing that if Israel has to hit the tunnel, it'll have

00:22:11.160 to blow up the school, and then the UN is going to complain about human rights atrocity. UNRWA schools

00:22:15.220 are dominant. I mean, Ismail Hania, the head of Hamas, is a graduate of an UNRWA school.

00:22:19.160 That is, you know, the reality, unfortunately, in the Gaza Strip and also in Judea and Samaria,

00:22:26.200 the West Bank. UNRWA is a garbage organization, but Joe Biden did the same thing. He came back in,

00:22:30.420 he immediately restored funding to UNRWA. And you're starting to see, again, this, even from

00:22:35.080 people who've been pretty good like Biden, you've started to see a shift back toward the status quo

00:22:40.080 ante, which is, well, you know, there does have to be a two-state solution. The two big narratives

00:22:45.320 that I've seen that are sort of moving in that direction, even from people who are pretty pro-Israel

00:22:49.960 so far, are the, we do have to keep warning the Jews not to be too rough. You know, we have to

00:22:55.100 warn them. Those Jews, you know, if we weren't warning them off just carpet bombing Gaza, that's

00:22:59.680 what they'd be doing today. And we've got to be very careful about the civilian casualties. Now,

00:23:03.300 I assume there's some politics to that. I assume that there's an attempt to basically

00:23:06.300 sort of placate some of the Arab countries that are surrounding, give them some cover with their own

00:23:12.200 people. But that does create this bizarre stupidity where you're supposed to think that if it weren't

00:23:18.160 for the West telling Israel to go hands off here, that Israel would be turning the Gaza Strip into

00:23:22.380 glass or something, which obviously is untrue. And Israel has never engaged in war in that form

00:23:26.800 or fashion. And by the way, Israel does have the power to do that. I mean, if Israel decided to

00:23:30.040 completely unleash the Air Force, there just wouldn't be any people alive in Gaza. This is the

00:23:33.600 difference between Israel and its enemies. If Israel decided to unleash its full military might,

00:23:36.320 there would be no civilians alive in the Gaza Strip, and they don't do it. And if Hamas had the

00:23:41.460 military might, there would be no civilians alive in Israel. And they do do that. That's exactly what

00:23:45.360 they attempt to do. So that's narrative number one. The other narrative is the two-state solution

00:23:50.120 stuff. Why this is the quote-unquote opportunity to talk about a two-state solution is absolutely

00:23:54.740 beyond me. Where is the evidence? And that, of course, carries the implication that if Israel were

00:23:59.420 just a little more giving, if they would just give a little harder, then this sort of stuff would

00:24:04.240 stop. And that's a lie. They abandoned the Gaza Strip in 2005. Hamas has run it ever since. They

00:24:08.500 turned it into a mini-terrorist state. And that's not a shock. That's exactly what would happen in

00:24:12.120 Judea and Samaria as well. That's exactly what would happen if there were a Palestinian state

00:24:15.140 in the West Bank. Everyone knows this. And so the idea that there's like a two-state solution just

00:24:18.860 around the corner, or the Palestinian people have vast disagreements with Hamas, Islamic Jihad,

00:24:24.480 the Palestinian authority, vast disagreements. They actually hate those people. Okay, well,

00:24:28.660 I wish that were true. I wish it were. If it is true, it would be about time for them to elect a

00:24:32.260 government or put in place a government willing to actually establish a successful

00:24:35.400 Palestinian state. So far, the evidence is not rolling in. We had Daniel Pipes on the podcast

00:24:39.740 a couple of weeks ago. And Daniel said that now is the time for Israel to obliterate Hamas.

00:24:46.560 And he thinks it must be done. But he also said something that I'm not sure about. He said

00:24:51.460 he believes, and he points to some polling, and I think you have to question polling in a place like

00:24:58.100 the Gaza Strip. But he said he believes that most Palestinian people want to rid themselves of

00:25:05.100 Hamas at this point, that they are done being used as human shields and cannon fodder. And now's the

00:25:10.780 time. What do you think? I mean, I certainly hope that's the case. But it's very, very difficult to

00:25:17.020 ascertain what those numbers look like. And it is true that a huge number of civilians support Hamas.

00:25:20.840 I mean, one of the things that people have not talked about at all is that during the attacks of

00:25:24.720 October 7th, there were literally thousands of civilians who joined in the murder spree.

00:25:29.320 There were civilians. I mean, there's tape of this. The civilians literally walked into

00:25:32.480 Kibbutz Beri, and they started stealing children's bicycles. They started engaging in some of the

00:25:38.400 atrocities that we saw. And this is full-on tape. And in fact, one of the big questions in this whole

00:25:45.260 attack was, how was it that Hamas knew exactly where to hit? They actually had maps. They found them

00:25:50.260 on their bodies of specific locations in each one of these locations with the number of people in

00:25:54.680 the house, with the house address, with how many people were of what age. And so the answer is

00:26:00.240 that there were workers from Gaza who Israel had given work permits to go into these areas and do

00:26:05.220 work, but had gone back to Hamas and handed over that information. So if there is a Gazan population

00:26:12.300 that doesn't want Hamas to be in charge, now would be an excellent time for you to say something about

00:26:16.140 it. And we can speculate as much as we want that if Hamas is destroyed, that there will be a new

00:26:22.260 day and Gazan civilians will suddenly put in place some liberal social justice party that is willing

00:26:29.040 to make peace with Israel. I'll believe it when I see it. So far, that has not been remotely the

00:26:33.180 case in any place. In fact, what the polls tend to show is that if there had been an election

00:26:37.060 in the West Bank, the reason there hasn't been an election in the West Bank for the last 10 years

00:26:40.460 is because Mahmoud Abbas hasn't had an election since 2008, I believe. That was the last season,

00:26:48.240 the 15th year of a four-year term, Mahmoud Abbas. The reason he hasn't held an election is because

00:26:52.980 what the polls tend to show is that if there were an election, Hamas would win. So again,

00:26:57.120 this idea that there's like this vast Palestinian population that is just itching for a peaceful

00:27:01.440 resolution with Israel, there may be some, but unless they have a political voice, there is no way for

00:27:07.340 us to ever find out. I mean, put aside whether it's true or not. There's literally no way for

00:27:10.460 Israel to make a deal with random people on the street. You can't do that. That's not how any of

00:27:14.100 this works. You mentioned that, you know, prior to this invasion, there was a lot of discussion about

00:27:20.520 judicial reform, not judicial reform. We've covered the protests that were happening on the streets of

00:27:26.120 Tel Aviv over Netanyahu's proposed changes. But, you know, there's going to be a reckoning

00:27:34.460 at the end of this. I think Netanyahu's going to wear some of this after a very, you know,

00:27:41.900 at times controversial, but also storied career as a politician. I think he's going to wear a lot of

00:27:46.980 this. Looking forward, what do you see happening? I think an entire generation of Israeli politicians

00:27:53.640 is getting wiped aside. So in Israeli politics, the one thing that you cannot do is miss the thing.

00:28:00.780 And so Golda Meir, who had a long history in Israeli politics and actually won an election

00:28:05.260 subsequent to the 1973 war. But because of the Yom Kippur war, her political career was basically

00:28:11.660 over. And she's seen as a very checkered figure by a lot of Israelis because of her missing it in

00:28:16.180 73. This is a much worse mess. And so Netanyahu is going to bear an extreme level of brunt from the

00:28:23.440 Israeli public. You can see that in the polls, 80 percent of the Israeli public is unhappy with the

00:28:27.520 government. That includes a huge number of people who voted for Netanyahu, who are now shifting away

00:28:32.020 from Netanyahu and looking for somebody else. You've already seen members of the government who

00:28:36.400 have taken responsibility for this. You have Gallant, who's the defense minister, has said that

00:28:39.800 he said, I take some responsibility for this. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett came out and said,

00:28:44.300 I take some responsibility for this. Benny Gantz, who's currently joined the government and was

00:28:48.280 part of the last government. He said, I take some responsibility for this. Bibi said there will be an

00:28:52.620 investigation. And then we'll see who takes responsibility for this. The one who has taken no

00:28:56.420 responsibility is, of course, Yair Lapid, who's sort of the left wing opposition to Netanyahu in the

00:29:01.000 state of Israel. But in the end, the the person who is most likely to provide the Israeli people

00:29:07.460 with the security that they require is going to be the next rising generation. And it's unclear who

00:29:12.820 that is. There isn't a figure who's quite like that right now. The polls right now show a lot of

00:29:16.240 support for Gantz because Gantz is a military figure who was the chief of the IDF. He was the head of

00:29:20.280 the IDF. And so there's a lot of maybe he knows what to do. But Israel, what Israel's entrenched

00:29:26.160 in right now is not really just a battle with Hamas. I mentioned before, a significantly larger

00:29:30.980 military threat to Israel is not from the Gaza Strip. It's from the north. And if Israel learned

00:29:35.040 one lesson from this is that you cannot wait until the bad guys decide to attack you. Israel is at

00:29:39.600 some point going to have to preemptively take out Hezbollah in the north. They simply cannot live

00:29:43.560 under the possibility of rocket fire every single day from the north. Again, the estimates say that

00:29:48.300 if Hezbollah were to fire all of its rockets, which is like 150,000 rockets there to fire all

00:29:54.560 of those rockets, you're not talking about 1,500 Israelis dead. You're talking about 20,000 to 30,000

00:29:59.060 Israelis dead. And that would presumably be accompanied by Hezbollah has apparently tens of

00:30:05.060 thousands, maybe 100,000 people in arms right now. I mean, that's not a minor army in the Middle East.

00:30:10.160 So the fact is that Israel's next 20 years are going to be about building up the economy,

00:30:14.000 strengthening the economy, and making sure that they take the preemptive steps

00:30:18.040 necessary to secure their own borders and make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

00:30:21.680 To wrap up, we started talking about how the infiltration of these ideas had hit

00:30:29.080 Western societies that were seeing Hamas celebrated in the streets. What would your advice be for

00:30:36.620 rolling this back? Is there a way to roll it back? How do we push back? A lot of my friends are saying,

00:30:42.260 all right, now I can see, you know, people are identifying themselves, but others are just

00:30:47.900 looking past it. What's your advice for recovering from this mental infiltration?

00:30:55.000 I mean, so first of all, as a civilization, anybody who is a sympathizer with Hamas, who you can legally

00:31:00.820 get out of your countries, do it. This doesn't seem like it should be all that controversial, but

00:31:05.200 suddenly it's become very controversial to suggest that if you support a terrorist group that you don't

00:31:08.540 actually deserve Western citizenship, that seems like a pretty obvious one. So if you're here on

00:31:11.760 a student visa and you're out there standing for Hamas, it seems to me that you should be expected

00:31:16.200 to leave. There's no reason we should continue to subsidize your presence in the West. That's

00:31:20.620 number one. Number two, the West is going to have to learn to stand up for its own values and recognize

00:31:24.080 that, yes, while the West has committed a myriad of sins across human history, the West is so far

00:31:28.380 superior in culture and values to groups like Hamas that this entire framework is stupid,

00:31:34.520 wrong, and evil. The entire framework that power necessarily means evil and powerlessness

00:31:39.320 necessarily means virtue is a lie. It's always been a lie. And so the idea that the only way

00:31:44.100 that you can restore your own virtue is to somehow surrender your power is not true at all. And if

00:31:49.980 the West doesn't muscularly start standing up for its own values, it's just going to commit suicide.

00:31:53.200 These groups don't have the power to destroy the West from without, but they certainly have the power

00:31:56.800 to help the West destroy itself from within. And that's what we have to stop.

00:32:00.740 Full, we have to stop that with every means at our disposal. Um, and you know, on a material level

00:32:06.300 with regard to Israel, that means you actually do have to provide the moral and material aid to

00:32:09.780 countries that are battling off the worst people on planet earth without, without clearing your

00:32:14.960 throat and without pretending that this is some sort of, of moral blight on you standing up for,

00:32:19.440 for the right side in a conflict. Ben, thanks so much for the time. Thanks a lot. You and your

00:32:22.820 family stay safe. I appreciate it. That was an incredibly personal and emotional interview with Ben

00:32:28.140 Shapiro, a man that I've interviewed more times than I can remember. It used to be a weekly

00:32:32.100 occurrence for about five years and someone who doesn't like to speak personally in that way,

00:32:40.560 a deeply moving interview in my view, but a smart and intelligent one. If you appreciated what Ben had

00:32:47.900 to say, I hope that you take some time and, and share this, um, to your personal friends, use your email,

00:32:54.240 use your social media, uh, however you can share and get out the word. I think he had important

00:32:59.700 things to say. If you're in the Calgary area, he will be speaking at an event on November 16th at the

00:33:06.440 Eagle Gray event center in Alberta. He'll be talking about, well, most likely a lot of this, but also

00:33:14.100 euthanasia, woke gender ideology, courts and schools revoking parental rights and governments

00:33:20.200 restricting freedom of speech. This is an event that you want to get to. If you haven't seen Ben

00:33:25.980 Shapiro speak in person, it is truly a treat. Thanks for listening today. Thanks for being

00:33:32.380 part of all of this full comment is a post media podcast. My name's Brian Lilly, your host.

00:33:37.200 This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive

00:33:42.740 producer. You can subscribe to full comment on Apple podcasts, Google, Spotify, Amazon music,

00:33:48.000 and more listen through the app or Alexa enabled devices and help us out by giving us a rating

00:33:52.760 or leaving a review. And of course, by telling your friends all about us. Thanks for listening

00:33:58.060 until next time. I'm Brian Lilly.

Full Comment - October 30, 2023

Ben Shapiro on why every Jew he knows is getting a gun

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